Re: [remote protocol] support for disabling packet acknowledgement

[Sandra Loosemore <sandra at codesourcery dot com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:57:14 -0400
> > From: Sandra Loosemore <sandra@codesourcery.com>
> > CC:  gdb@sourceware.org,  gdb-patches@sourceware.org,   Pedro Alves <pedro@codesourcery.com>
> >
> > Paul Koning wrote:
> >
> > > I'm not sure this is a good idea.
> > >
> > > For one thing, if you want to work on performance, there are much more
> > > dramatic changes to the protocol that could be done that would help
> > > much more.  I can't believe that the cost of acks is significant
> > > compared to all the other bottlenecks.
> > You'll note the documentation says turning off acks may be desirable to reduce 
> > communication overhead *or* "for other reasons".  In fact, it is the "other 
> > reasons" that motivated this patch.  We are working on designing the extensions 
> > to the remote protocol to support nonstop mode, and we realized that we simply 
> > cannot do it in combination with using +/- acks on the asynchronous responses.
>
> Then please just say so in the docs.

As you'll note from subsequent discussion, we decided to use another mechanism 
for non-stop mode, so it has no dependence on the noack mode patch any more. 
I'm not sure what else you think the docs for noack mode should say?

Incidentally, I am working on docs for non-stop mode now -- both the user-level 
changes, and the remote protocol pieces.

-Sandra